Using Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance' to hear | Cosmos

In new work that connects two of Albert Einstein’s ideas in a way he could scarcely have imagined, physicists have proposed a way to improve gravitational wave detectors, using the weirdness of quantum physics.

The new proposal, published in Nature Physics, could double the sensitivity of future detectors listening out for ripples in spacetime caused by catastrophic collisions across the universe.

When the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves in late 2015 it was the first direct evidence of the gravitational waves Einstein had predicted a century before.

Now it another of Einstein’s predictions – one he regarded as a failure – could potentially double the sensitivity of LIGOs successors.

The story starts with his distaste for quantum theory – or at least for the fundamental fuzziness of all things it seemed to demand.

Einstein thought the universe would ultimately prove predictable and exact, a clockwork universe rather than one where God “plays dice”. In 1935 he teamed up with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen to publish a paper they thought would be a sort of reductio ad absurdum. They hoped to disprove quantum mechanics by following it to its logical, ridiculous conclusion. Their ‘EPR paradox’ (named for their initials) described the instantaneous influence of one particle on another, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” because it seemed at first to be impossible.

Yet this sally on the root of quantum physics failed, as the EPR effect turned out not to be a paradox after all. Quantum entanglement, as it’s now known, has been repeatedly proven to exist, and features in several proposed quantum technologies, including quantum computation and quantum cryptography.